David Lang (composer)

David Lang is also the name of an American athlete.

David Lang (b. Los Angeles, California, 1957) is an American composer. Together with Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, Lang co-founded Bang on a Can in 1987.

He can be seen as a composer who challenges the status quo. He sometimes gives his concert pieces strange, and even iconoclastic titles such as Eating Living Monkeys (1985) and Bonehead (1990). His music can be in turn: comic, abrasive, soothing and it usually retains elements of conceptualism. It is also informed by modernism, minimalism, and rock -- and can perhaps be best described by the term post-minimalism.

He was a major contributor to the string quartet music, performed by Kronos Quartet, in the film Requiem for a Dream (2000).

Lang holds degrees from Stanford University, the University of Iowa, and Yale University (Ph.D., 1989). His teachers have included Jacob Druckman, Hans Werner Henze, and Martin Bresnick.

Lang's music has been released on the Argo/Decca, BMG, Cantaloupe Music, Chandos, CRI, Point, and Sony Classical labels. His scores are published by Red Poppy Music (available from G. Schirmer, Inc.)

Film

• New York Composers: Searching for a New Music (1997). Directed by Michael Blackwood. Produced by Michael Blackwood Productions, in association with Westdeutscher Rundfunk. New York, New York: Michael Blackwood Productions.

External links

• David Lang works page from G. Schirmer, Inc. site

Listening

• Art of the States: David Lang